day; those who could not gain entrance weathered the winter cold as they gathered around the windows and doorways to catch a glimpse of the proceedings. Eighteen days of examinations, cross-examinations, and speeches produced 2,000 pages of testimony, and on February 11, McDowell confirmed his decision to fire Van Waters on most of the charges he had brought against her, particularly her resistance to his authority as commissioner and to state law. Encouraged by broad public support, Van Waters appealed to Massachusetts Governor Paul Dever for a re-hearing. Dever agreed, appointing a three-member panel to hear the case de novo, beginning March 4. The panel members were Caroline Putnam, a Catholic charities worker; Robert Clark, a county district attorney, and Erwin Griswold, then dean of the Harvard Law School and later a U.S. solicitor general. During the second hearing, Dwyer presented McDowell's side of the case, questioned Van Waters for four days, including one day devoted to homosexuality, and called many other witnesses to testify, while Cross led the defense, calling on sympathetic witnesses, cross-examining McDowell, and rebutting Dwyer. Henry F. Fielding, a lawyer appointed by the state attorney general to represent the prosecution, gave a weak closing argument. On March 11, the three-member panel unanimously reversed McDowell's decision to fire Van Waters, finding no evidence of irregularities or errors of judgment on her part that were not made in good faith. They praised Van Waters's use of indenture and child-placement, dismissed the charges related to homosexuality, and agreed that Van Waters had operated within her legal authority even though she had not always done what McDowell ordered. Decline (1950–57) Despite Van Waters' triumph in the hearings, renewed political attacks, changes in prison populations, and changing views about gender, led to new limits on Van Waters' authority. McDowell, until his retirement in 1951, continued to oppose non-domestic indenture and the parole board resisted many of Van Waters' recommendations. One of the board members, Katharine Sullivan, wrote a book, Girls on Parole, in which she claimed that older lesbians in prisons preyed upon younger newcomers and converted them to homosexuality. Accusations about drug use and aggressive homosexuality at the reformatory led Van Waters to recruit a student, Katherine Gabel, from Smith College to pose as an inmate. Gabel discovered that an inmate subculture was importing narcotics in the necks of ketchup bottles, and she saw one woman stab another in a